The University of Arizona’s senior vice president, Joel Valdez, officially retires this week. Planning VP Bob Smith is taking over in the interim.

Provost Meredith Hay is leading a national search committee for Valdez’s replacement. She commented on the search during a strategic planning meeting last month. According to meeting minutes: “The committee is having difficulty attracting a diverse pool of candidates. The Hispanic candidates have all withdrawn, citing SB 1070 as an issue of sufficient concern regarding bringing their families to Arizona.”

The Senate confirmation hearings for Elena Kagan's Supreme Court nomination got underway this morning, and today has so far proven to be mind-numbingly dull a little slow. What we've seen are opening statements from Judiciary Committee members -- all of whom seem to have already made up their minds -- and nothing else.

But there are some gems to be gleaned from some of the mini-speeches senators have delivered. Greg Sargent, for example, highlighted some fascinating comments from Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R.), in which the right-wing Arizonan took on the very concept of judges looking out for the defenseless.

"Judge Sotomayor explicitly rejected the 'empathy' standard espoused by President Obama -- a standard where 'legal process alone' is deemed insufficient to decide the so-called 'hard cases'; a standard where the 'critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge's heart.'

"Perhaps because his first nominee failed to defend the judicial philosophy that he was promoting, the President has repackaged it. Now, he says that judges should have 'a keen understanding of how the law affects the daily lives of the American people ... and know that in a democracy, powerful interests must not be allowed to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens.' [...]

"Kagan wrote a tribute to Justice Marshall in which she said in his view it was the role of the courts and interpreting the Constitution to protect the people who went unprotected by every other organ of government. The court existed primarily to fulfill this mission. And later, when she was working in the Clinton administration, she encouraged a colleague working on a speech about Justice Marshall to emphasize his unshakable determination to protect the underdog."

I suppose I'm not the target audience here, but this reads like praise to me. President Obama thinks jurists should have "a keen understanding of how the law affects the daily lives of the American people"? That sounds like a principle with real value. "Powerful interests must not be allowed to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens"? Sign me up. Looking at the courts as champions of those "unprotected by every other organ of government"? Preach it, brother. Thurgood Marshall had an "unshakable determination to protect the underdog"? No wonder he's a national hero.

Except, of course, Kyl meant all of this as a condemnation. What I perceive as compliments were intended as derision. Kyl was repackaging progressive principles and commitments to protect the defenseless as concepts to be ignored and rejected. Indeed, the subtext wasn't subtle -- to embrace these ideas makes one unsuitable for the bench, at least as far Kyl is concerned.

Maybe my perceptions of public attitudes are off, but I don't imagine most Americans would recoil at the notion of a federal judge looking out for the voices of ordinary citizens, before they're drowned out by powerful interests. Nor do I think the American mainstream's sensibilities are offended by Thurgood Marshall's interest in protecting the underdog.

BP spends $0 on spill response research Rachel Maddow reviews new strategies to contain and clean up the oil from BP's deepwater blow-out and new revelations that BP has not bothered to fund any new research on cleanup technology despite making tens of billions in profits.

Even the warnings that were coming from the Macondo Deepwater drilling operation didn't make a difference. It's easy to see how they could ignore the warnings though because they were only doing what the rest of the corporate world had done quite (financially) successfully in the credit crisis. The deepwater drilling was Big Oil's answer to the casino culture that was and is so present on Wall Street. From Big Oil's perspective, they just watched Wall Street gamble and lose everything yet still get bailed out so how could they lose?

Much like Wall Street, sure, some companies may not make it beyond this gamble but they'll be paid handsomely on the way out the door. For the victor will be the reward of even larger than too-big-to-fail which will translate into even more money. Maybe BP will end up being the near term loser but they just as easily could have been the winner in this casino culture. The end result for everyone else is even greater reliance on fewer but even larger oil companies.

Obama has the misfortune of inheriting this mess from Bush and the GOP but it doesn't mean he should accept it and stay the course as he's done with Wall Street. A bit of change to the ridiculous self-regulation and economies of scale lies needs to addressed sooner than later. Bringing order to these gamblers needs to happen immediately.

BP staked its future on expanding offshore drilling a month before the catastrophic explosion on the Deepwater Horizon triggered the United States' worst environmental disaster, according to company documents revealed yesterday.

The investigative web site ProPublica published a March 2010 strategy document in which BP named "expanding deepwater" as its number one area for long-term growth.

But even as the document was drawn up, engineers were struggling to control the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, which had already gained a reputation as a risky operation, according to industry sources.

The strategy paper claimed BP now held a global lead over its competitors in deepwater production – even though its costs were considerably lower. Earlier this month the executives of BP's rivals, including Exxon and Chevron, told a congressional hearing they would have taken more safeguards on the doomed Deepwater Horizon rig.

I told myself I wasn't going to write anything else about the Dave Weigel matter today, but Greg Sargent's rebuke to his anonymous colleagues whining to Jeffrey Goldberg about those awful new bloggers is worth noting. Here are some of the statements given to Goldberg:

"This is really about the serial stupidity of allowing these bloggers to trade on the name of the Washington Post."

"It makes me crazy when I see these guys referred to as reporters. They're anything but. And they hurt the newspaper when they claim to be reporters."

The cowardly hiding behind anonymonity is pathetic enough. But let's take on the substance of this. I submit that someone can be a "real" reporter if he or she is accurate on the facts and fairly represents the positions of subjects; if he or she has a decent sense of what's newsworthy and important to readers; and if readers come away from his or her stuff feeling more informed than they were before.

I remember a time when there was nothing more vile than those nasty bloggers with their anonymous comment sections. Behind veils of anonymity, the cowardly hordes of the Internet would spew rivers of bile and the real journalists would clutch their pearls and lament the decline of public discourse. Now that the bloggers have moved into the newsroom, some of these "traditional" reporters have joined the cesspool of anonymous flaming they once used as examples of why blogging couldn't be taken seriously as a journalistic medium.

Now that the smoke has cleared from the Dave Weigel mess, here's a response to the anonymous sources inside the Post who used Jeffrey Goldberg's blog to urinate on the type of opinionated journalism that Weigel, Ezra Klein and others (myself included) practice.

The sources told Goldberg that practitioners of this type of journalism are not real reporters:

"This is really about the serial stupidity of allowing these bloggers to trade on the name of the Washington Post."

"It makes me crazy when I see these guys referred to as reporters. They're anything but. And they hurt the newspaper when they claim to be reporters."

The cowardly hiding behind anonymonity is pathetic enough. But let's take on the substance of this. I submit that someone can be a "real" reporter if he or she is accurate on the facts and fairly represents the positions of subjects; if he or she has a decent sense of what's newsworthy and important to readers; and if readers come away from his or her stuff feeling more informed than they were before.

There's simply no reason why caring what happens in politics -- prefering one outcome to another -- should inherently interfere with this mission. By publicly advertising a point of view, bloggers are simply being forthcoming about their filter: They are letting readers in on what guides their editorial choices. This allows readers to pick and choose communities where they can expect discussions about topics that interest them with other, generally like-minded readers.

There's no basis whatsoever for the B.S. charge that revealing a point of view of necessity compromises the integrity of the actual information purveyed. If Ezra isn't a "real" reporter, why did readers of his stuff feel more informed about the ins and outs of the health care debate than after consuming the work of a hundred other journalists? Why did readers feel more informed by Weigel's stuff about the Tea Partiers than they did by hundreds of more "objective" articles about the topic that appeared in scores of "neutral" publications?

If the reporting on these blogs isn't "real," then why do other news orgs consistently follow up on their scoops?

If Ezra isn't a "real" reporter, why was he able to obtain Senate finance committee health proposal before other reporters did? Why was my humble opinionated blog the first to break the news that Bill Clinton had been dispatched by the White House to feel out whether Joe Sestak would be open to alternatives to running for Senate?

Is the problem that these blogs are "partisan"? Nope. While the authors of these blogs are open about preferring one outcome or another in politics, they aren't simply driven by a desire for one party to succeed at all costs. Rather, they are rooting for particular policy outcomes or are, by their own lights, pushing to elevate the discourse. Ezra repeatedly criticized the Dem leadership throughout the health care fight. Weigel sometimes defended Sarah Palin and Tea Partiers when he thought they'd been wronged. This blog regularly whacks Dems when they cravenly sell out their own principles.

Folks at the traditional news orgs, for good reason, think very highly of Ben Smith. So listen to what Smith says: That these two forms "can flourish side by side, each going places the other is unwelcome, and each correcting for the other's weaknesses."

Time for those who are anonymously dissing this form of journalism to just shut the hell up, let us all do our thing, and let the readers decide. If this type of blogging is not "real" reporting, just ignore it and readers will eventually figure out that the traditional approach is the only one that's genuinely informing them. And the new approach will just wither way. Right?

1 comment:

Arzona: I hope that every American, regardless of where he lives, will stop and examine his conscience about this and other related incidents. This Nation was founded by men of many nations and backgrounds. It was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and that the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened. All of us ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as one would wish his children to be treated, but this is not the case.

I know the proponents of this law say that the majority approves of this law, but the majority is not always right. Would women or non-whites have the vote if we listen to the majority of the day, would the non-whites have equal rights (and equal access to churches, housing, restaurants, hotels, retail stores, schools, colleges and yes water fountains) if we listen to the majority of the day? We all know the answer, a resounding, NO!

Today we are committed to a worldwide struggle to promote and protect the rights of all who wish to be free. In a time of domestic crisis men of good will and generosity should be able to unite regardless of party or politics and do what is right, not what is just popular with the majority. Some men comprehend discrimination by never have experiencing it in their lives, but the majority will only understand after it happens to them.